Many of us used the old DEC PDP-series of computers. You could easily argue that these computers blazed the trail for the idea that a computer could “belong” to someone who would use it themselves and not be shared across a company with an army of acolytes to feed and service it.

But not many of us worked on the first PDP computers (I certainly didn’t) and it is interesting to see how far those little computers came over the years.

The Computer History Museum has a great online exhibit:
http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/index.php

Of course, with an FPGA you can build your own PDP computer: http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html

The PDP-8, maybe the most important member of the PDP family originally had 8 instructions! You can run a real one (not a simulation) at:
http://www.pdp8.net/run.shtml